adBlockAd blocking is one of the more controversial features of Apple’s new iOS release. Apple prefers to call it “content blocking,” but it’s mostly intended to block all those pesky website ads that nag us every day.

Publishers are, of course, totally freaked out at the prospect of their content being consumed without monetizing the accompanying ads. And although ad blockers have been around for quite awhile, they’ve become a front-page story because Apple now makes it so easy to eliminate ads in their Safari browser.

To assess the impact of ad blockers in Web browsers I think it’s worth studying the evolution of a similar medium: Television. TV started with totally free, over-the-air broadcasts. Advertisers subsidized those shows and everyone was happy. Then cable arrived and an interesting thing happened: Most of us were willing to actually pay for all those free channels.

Why? Two reasons: Better reception and more channels, although not the hundreds of channels available today. I remember our family’s first cable connection back in the early 1970’s. We went from three fuzzy stations to approximately 12 crisp, clear ones. That wasn’t a huge increase but it was important enough for my parents to sign up for a monthly payment.

Today we have cable, satellite, etc., with ad-subsidized channels, pay channels and that wonderful technology known as the DVR; each of these have their own business models. But with website content the business models still appear to be stuck in the early cable TV era.

On the web we have access to both free, ad-subsidized content as well as content behind paywalls. As ad blockers become more mainstream it forces publishers to make a strategic choice with their free content. Some will continue what they’ve always done: offering free content and now accepting the fact that more reading is taking place without the benefit of ad impression income. Others will push more of their content behind a paywall, reducing consumption but enjoying a false sense of contentment knowing that they aren’t being gamed by the ad-blocking crowd.

Others will embrace something in between. Their content will still be free and ad-subsidized, but in order to access it readers will have to agree to view the accompanying ads. Call it the “ad blocker blocker”. Technology will be developed to display the content only if the ads are also displayed. In fact, you could argue certain mobile apps and video pre-roll ads without skip/fast-forward buttons are examples of how this is happening today; perhaps we’ll see more publishers push their free content off the web and into mobile apps where ad blocking isn’t quite as easy. Yes, solutions will be developed to override this model as well, taking the cat-and-mouse game to a whole new level. But for the free ride to continue, mechanisms like this will have to emerge to ensure content creators and publishers have the revenue stream to keep producing.

It’s an evolution and only the strong and efficient will survive. But it’s also an important step leading to what I believe will be a future with deeper content engagement. After all, if readers find your ads so irritating, doesn’t that say something about your website experience? The ad-blocking movement should be a wakeup call for publishers everywhere, forcing them to do something radical: make the advertising experience more engaging and less annoying for readers.

Reproduced with permission from Joe Wikert’s Digital Content Strategies.

1 COMMENT

  1. Several things.

    “Apple prefers to call it “content blocking,” but it’s mostly intended to block all those pesky website ads that nag us every day.”

    This is wrong. It is content blocking, not ad blocking. Far more important to Apple is the JavaScript junk that’s loaded for many reasons other than presenting content to the user (trackers, analytics, etc.) which kills batteries. For users, it’s about ads to some degree, but generally not because they “nag us everyday”, but because they actually often make the site unusable (blocking content, preventing scrolling and worse on mobile devices), and drastically effect page load times and overall bandwidth consumed grossly disproportionate to the size of the ad image.

    “Some will continue what they’ve always done: offering free content and now accepting the fact that more reading is taking place without the benefit of ad impression income.”

    That’s not sustainable for most. Income has to be made.

    “Others will push more of their content behind a paywall, reducing consumption but enjoying a false sense of contentment knowing that they aren’t being gamed by the ad-blocking crowd.”

    “gamed” is a loaded word. Paywalls are not a good solution, for either the consumer or the producer. The web lives and dies by the hyperlink, and paywalls kill the hyperlink. Yes, some may opt for this strategy, but it’s already a strategy abandoned by many, so I doubt many go this route.

    “Their content will still be free and ad-subsidized, but in order to access it readers will have to agree to view the accompanying ads.”

    This has already started to happen, but I believe this strategy will fail as well. At least, if this is all the site does, it will fail. If they also clean up their act with regard to usability, bandwidth usage and privacy, then such a strategy might work. Otherwise, most users will decide to simply go elsewhere. This also has the same detrimental aspects that paywalls do, however, so this isn’t a good solution.

    This analysis ignores the many other solutions. There’s paid for content, basically an ad in the guise of an article/post. There’s danger in that approach when it’s not done correctly, but many sites already monetize this way. Then there’s advertising served by the site, rather than by a third party via client side code or links. If the ad comes from the site your visiting, you can’t block it. This puts a burden on the content producers, but one that should be there anyway. They should have an investment in the quality of what they are serving up. This approach would reduce many of the issues that exist with web ads today, while continuing to enable the content producers to monetize through ads.

    In your TV analogy, the TV broadcaster has taken the kind of control I’m talking about. They provide strict requirements on the ad (length, restrictions on content such as adhering to broadcast decency laws, etc.) before they’ll even be considered, and then they choose which ads to show and when. Web advertising today doesn’t follow this. The website injects a bit of JavaScript or other code into the page, and from that point forward some ad agency is in complete control of what gets injected into the page and presented to the user. Given complete control, these advertisers, who don’t care about the user, have pushed the boundaries to the extreme and destroyed the user experience for most of the web. User’s are just reacting to this, and producers have to figure that out and adjust, or they will die due to lack of monetization.

The TeleRead community values your civil and thoughtful comments. We use a cache, so expect a delay. Problems? E-mail newteleread@gmail.com.